States of Mind About the Ruhr

Showing the Danger in the Common Habit of Ascribing Simple Motives to Complex Political Units

WALTER LIPPMANN

THERE are always more people interested in finding out who started the fire than in helping the firemen, 'therefore, the saints arc noticed on the editorial page, but the devil is news. And generally, except when they feel a practical responsibility, men are more interested in fixing the blame than in fixing the trouble. There is enormous satisfaction in being able to say: it was Wilson's fault, or it was Lloyd George's fault, or it was Poincare's fault, 'the satisfaction is so great that most of us mistake it for a solution, and think that we have helped the world when we have relieved our feelings.

This weakness of our natures is most evident when we are confronted with an evil about which we feel we can do nothing. The affairs of Europe are such an evil, and Americans who are at all concerned are conscious that they are frustrated by an Administration which has, as someone remarked recently, nailed its colors to the fence. We arc a nation witnessing a stupendous action which stirs a great many of us deeply. We feel in our bones that the outcome may decide for our generation whether we are to live in a world that has the vitality to create and invent or in a world prostrated by its hate and its despair. We are conscious and we are helpless.

So we declaim and exclaim. We are proFrench or pro-British, or pro-German, as if such opinions mattered a tinker's damn one way or the other. We dispute mightily who is the villain and who is little Eva, trying to fool ourselves into thinking that we are fine redblooded men standing at Armageddon and battling for the Lord. In reality we are just letting off steam, because the engine is stalled somewhere on Pennsylvania Avenue between the White House and the Capitol. It won't go forward, and it can't go backward, so for want of anything better to do we blow the whistle and ring the bell, and secretly hope that somebody will forget that we are standing still.

The Senatorial Coué

FOR that is all that our fervid sympathies come to in the end. Senator Reed of Pennsylvania rises in the Senate and makes an eloquent defence of Poincare. He sits down amid great applause. He sits down and remains seated and the net result is that the halls of Congress have rung with an eloquent defence of Poincare. Senator Hitchcock of Nebraska rises in the Senate and makes a passionate denunciation of Poincare. He sits down amid great applause, and the net result is a newspaper dispatch saying that Poincare has been flayed. For all practical purposes M. Poincare is as unaffected by either speech as if he were Tut-Ankh-Amen himself. For all the purposes of statesmanship, the Senators might as well shout at Europe, ça passe, ça passe, as any of the phrases they do shout. The Senators would feel just as well, and Europe would feel just as badly.

We think in one way about life when we are trying to affect the outcome and in quite a different way when we are merely watching life go by. When we are attempting to reach a result we judge men and policies by their contribution to the result. When we are merely spectators we judge men and policies by our moral and aesthetic prejudices.

Towards Europe we are spectators, and so our opinions of the struggle are formed almost entirely on the antique model, according to which there is in every drama, a hero, a villain, and an afflicted girl. The dispute in America about the Ruhr has turned on finding the villain. For we are convinced there must be a villain. And even if there is none, it would be necessary for the purposes of righteous indignation to invent one.

That is easy to do because in popular thinking we always personify foreign nations. Having made them into individual persons, it is but a step to endowing them with fixed moral character. And when that is done it is ever so simple to have feelings about them. It is ever so simple to prove to yourself that your feelings are right. If you make up your mind that France is thus and so you can find all the Frenchmen you need who are very convincingly thus and so. In order to be absolutely sure of your opinion all that is required is that you fail to notice any Frenchmen who are not thus and so.

Personifying Nations

THE habit of personifying nations is, of course, fatal to clear thinking about international politics. We ask ourselves, for example, why France seized the Ruhr. And one section of the community answers at once that "France" did it because that was the only way to collect reparations. And another section answers at once that "France" did it because she wished to ruin Germany.

Those who think that "France" acted simply as a sheriff can produce no end of Frenchmen who are for the Ruhr expedition simply because they think it will yield money due to France. But those who explain the Ruhr as an adventure in imperialism can also produce Frenchmen who very clearly wish to establish a Rhenish Republic and make the Rhine the frontier of France. But the truth surely is that a decision like that in the Ruhr is never taken by a complex nation for any one reason or any one motive. It is perfectly possible, and, I am convinced, wholly probable, that Foch marched into the Ruhr backed by Frenchmen who wanted reparations, by Frenchmen who wanted security, by Frenchmen who aimed at European hegemony, by Frenchmen who wished to destroy German industrial competition, by Frenchmen who are seeking revenge, by Frenchmen who hoped to attach the Rhineland. "France" can unite on the Ruhr so long as all the divergent groups of Frenchmen believe that the Ruhr expedition will accomplish the particular object they believe it will accomplish.

It is not necessary for people to agree on their reasons in politics, so long as they agree on the decision. We know that in our own political life perfectly well. We do not imagine for a minute that the sixteen millions who voted for Harding all had the same principles. How could they have had them, since nobody can name a principle which some influential part of the Harding vote did not strenuously repudiate? Why then should we personify France as if it had a single, consistent, lucid mind?

When we personify a nation we really personify our own ignorance of it exactly as primitive peoples personify any natural event which they do not understand. And when we have personified it, it becomes impossible to think, because we are moving in a wholly fictitious and subjective world, where good men in pure white uniforms fight bad men in jet black ones.

Nothing of this sort really happens at the places where the fight is actually being fought. At the final Allied conference, for example, before.the French government decided to enter the Ruhr, M. Poincare made a proposal. It provided among other things for a reduction of Germany's debt from thirty-three to twelve and a half billions in exchange for cancellation of the inter-allied debts. Now this part of the French proposal was really addressed not to Germany, but to Britain and America. But in actual fact when we by our attitude on the debts made it impossible for Europe to consider this proposal, we were not "for" anybody in particular or "against" anybody in particular. We were just obstructing the one possible exit from the burning building.

But of course we know perfectly well that we are not the villains of the piece. We no more feel mercenary than the French feel militaristic, or the Germans feel dishonest. We know there are complicated reasons why we do what we do, and that some of these reasons are good, and some are bad, but all of them come to the same result in the end. Europe is just as complicated as we are, and so the beginning of wisdom about Europe is to stop thinking that either France or Germany is single-minded. We shall think more clearly about M. Poincare if we remember how extraordinarily his rigidity resembles that of Mr. Hughes, and about Chancellor Cuno, when we remember that he is a man driven like Mr. Harding by contentious and noisy factions.

If the first requisite of clear thinking about Europe is to substitute constellations of parties, classes, sects, individuals, and industries, for the mannikins "France" and "Germany", the second necessity is to think of their actions from the point of view of the consequences rather than the provocation. It is human to say that France was justified in going into the Ruhr, that she had suffered greatly, and had not been paid. But if you think that by going into the Ruhr France will in the end suffer more and be paid less, what good is your justification?

Historic Wrongs

IT is one thing to work for a practicable arrangement by which ruined houses, factories and railroads can be rebuilt, or an arrangement by which nations can be secured against the probability of more war. It is quite another to make the righting of historic wrongs the first and only principle of statesmanship. For the historic wrongs of this world are simply unending. They can never all be righted, and therefore most of them have to be forgotten.

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The generation which actually participated in the infliction of the wrong can in some measure be made to right it. But with the passing of that generation the distinction between the wronged and the wrongdoer is washed out to sea. The children of 1914 inherit no moral responsibility for what the children of 1870 did. They inherit the consequences, whichever side of a national boundary they were born. But they do not inherit the virtue or the sin, the guilt or the innocence. They will have to deal with the problems of 1914-1919 through a different justice than their parents invoked, because guilt is wholly personal and incapable of being transmitted fromonegencration toanother.

The deepest error of the peacemakers at Paris was the failure to grasp the fact that new generations are coming and the old passing out. They could not see, or would not see, that a nation is not an immortal person, but a succession of people who are born and mature and die. The post-war leaders forgot that the European armies of 1925 will have in them almost no veterans of the war, that in the Europe of 1950 the active Germans and Frenchmen will be the infants of 1914. It is vanity to suppose that the moral classifications of mankind which were true in 1919 will remain true throughout the greater part of this coming century. And if it is vanity to suppose that, it is vanity to discuss the present state of Europe by asking who has been the biggest devil. The only question of any importance to mankind at the moment is not who was right or wrong four years ago, but who is wise or foolish as to the future.